


Remember Us This Way

by Deg7907



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Angst, Bottom John, Episode Fix-it, Established Sherlock Holmes/John Watson, Guys they just love each other so much, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Implied/Referenced Torture, It's going to be okay, M/M, PWP, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Post-Reichenbach, Sherlock returns, Top Sherlock, episode AU, mary who's mary
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-06
Updated: 2019-01-06
Packaged: 2019-10-05 13:07:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17325575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deg7907/pseuds/Deg7907
Summary: “Idiot,” John said, reaching forth and grasping Sherlock’s shirt. He balled his hands in the fabric roughly, knuckles turning white. He pulled, and Sherlock stepped forward. They were close now. Sherlock ducked down and pressed his nose into John’s soft blond spikes in a comforting gesture. John looked up and their faces were very close, close enough that he could breathe out against Sherlock’s lips and hear him swallow tightly in response. “Big fuckin’ idiot.”





	Remember Us This Way

**Author's Note:**

> This is my very first fanfiction. Inspired by some of the downright EPICS that are out there, I finally decided to try my hand. It wasn't proof-read or beta'd, so all errors are my own. I...I just love them so much, you guys.
> 
> Warnings: Referenced/implied torture, referenced/implied suicidal tendencies/attempts(?)
> 
> Established relationship before The Fall that resumes when Sherlock comes back. Mary? Who's Mary? John hasn't moved on, that's crazy-talk.
> 
> Listened to the "A Star Is Born" soundtrack a LOT while writing this. "I'll Never Love Again"? Holy shit. The feels. THE FEELS!

John woke up in pieces, because Sherlock wasn’t there.

For just a moment—between the seconds it took for his eyes to slide open blearily and that first deep sigh of non-slumber to enter his lungs—he was okay. That half-step between sleep and waking where the world was fuzzy and calm was bliss, because he didn’t remember what was lost to him.

Then—  
_!!!SHERLOCK!!!_  
—the world crashed in, and he fell with it.

“No,” he heard someone groan brokenly, and it was him. He was whimpering it over and over. “Oh, no. No, no…”

This wasn’t the usual earthquake he’d ridden out nearly every morning for the last two years. It was so much worse, because _Sherlock had come home_. John remembered the knock at the door, and opening it, and _he had been there_.

The bed-space next to him was empty. He reached over and pressed shaking fingertips to the sheet next to him. It was cool to the touch. Nobody had lain there, not recently.

…Not for years.

John let out a hiss of agony as his mind raced to catch up with what his heart already knew. Sherlock hadn’t come home at all. It had been a dream.

Only a dream.

_It seemed so real. God, oh God, I can’t do this—I can’t take this, my heart can’t fucking take this, am I dying? I can’t breathe! I can’t…_

He leapt from bed, eyes wide and fever-bright. Tears coursed down his cheeks, down his neck, but he couldn’t be bothered to wipe them away. He barely felt them. He could barely feel his body at all. His legs and feet were numb, and he stumbled. Almost fell. Instead he slammed his bare shoulder into the wall hard enough to sting, hard enough to bruise, but he didn’t feel it.

Numb except his lungs. They burned. They **screamed**. There was no air in the house at all, because it’d been a dream.

Distantly, logically, he knew he was having a panic attack, but for all the world it felt like he was dying. Sherlock had done it. Sherlock had died, and of course he hadn’t come home last night, so why not? It could happen to anyone, it had happened to the best man he’d ever known, so it could happen to him, right now even—

There were footsteps in the hall. Hurried, surprisingly light footsteps, given the size of the man John knew they belonged to. He’d heard those footsteps for years in this house, in that hallway, before the silence of the last few years. He’d know them anywhere. He didn’t believe them, though. If he dared to believe it might be true, if dared to believe and it wasn’t, it would break him completely. Instead of elation, he felt only dread as he turned his gaze to the bedroom door and waited for horror to walk in. 

“John? Did you fall? Are you okay?” Came the familiar baritone, grave with worry, and then he was there. Not a horror at all. Not a horror that was masquerading, not a nightmare wearing his face, but Sherlock. Sherlock for real. He was still in his undershirt and pants, the clothes he’d fallen asleep in the night before. He paused a few feet away, eyes wide but calm, taking in the sight in front of him. “John?”

“You’re…” John gasped as air crashed back into his lungs. His limbs tingled and began to shake as blood and feeling rushed back in, wonderful and overwhelming all at once. “You’re here.”

“Yes,” Sherlock said, uncertainly. He reached out a hand to caress the air between them, as if scared to touch the obviously fragile thing in front of him.

Not fragile always. John was a solider and he was built like one, inside and out. Sturdy. Open-faced. Calm with a concrete spine but…fragile now. Mere gossamer, really.

John wrenched his eyes from Sherlock’s face to that hand, staring at it, then pushed himself off the wall. He closed the space and the fingers, long and thin and gentle, too, grazed the skin of his cheek. They moved to caress the side of his face, resting on the line of his jaw. Warm. Alive. He could have cried but his tears had disappeared. They’d dried up even as the wet trails still streamed down his face, his very eyes refusing to obscure the image in front of him.

“Where were you, then?” John said. His tone held that same almost-conversational quality it always took on when he was worse for wear than he was letting on. The excessive blinking, the slight downward tilt of his chin to look at Sherlock from under his brow-bone, and the clench of his left fist gave away the score.

“Sorry,” Sherlock murmured. He understood what John was asking, what was really happening here. Of course, he did. He was the one who’d caused this now, that day back then when he’d leapt to his apparent death, so he kept his voice soft and apologetic. “I’m sorry. I had to make calls, I didn’t…I didn’t want to wake you.” 

“Idiot,” John said, reaching forth and grasping Sherlock’s shirt. He balled his hands in the fabric roughly, knuckles turning white. He pulled, and Sherlock stepped forward. They were close now. Sherlock ducked down and pressed his nose into John’s soft blond spikes in a comforting gesture. John looked up and their faces were very close, close enough that he could breathe out against Sherlock’s lips and hear him swallow tightly in response. “Big fuckin’ idiot.”

The kiss that followed was cautious. John let go of Sherlock’s shirt and slid his hands under the fabric, pressing his palms to the lean flesh of his sides instead. Sherlock’s hands slipped from John’s face to neck, fingertips pressed to the erratic heartbeat in his throat. 

The kiss turned warm. The tip of Sherlock’s tongue against John’s mouth was an apology; John parting his lips and letting him in was forgiveness.

John took a step forward, then another, and Sherlock moved with him until he couldn’t anymore. The reading lamp next to the bed rattled warningly on the wooden end table as shoulder blades met abruptly with the lightly-textured bedroom wall.

“Sorry,” John gasped against Sherlock’s mouth, momentarily breaking the contact. Sherlock looked down dazedly, pressing forward to follow John as he moved away. The taller man let out a non-committal grunt, and John knew—he could see it in his mind’s eye clearly—that Sherlock would have waved it off with the dismissive twist of his wrist in a fashion the doctor had witnessed a hundred times before at various _boring_ crime scenes, if Sherlock’s hands could be bothered at that moment to move from their possessive positions on John’s body. With a small smile and half-lidded eyes, John leaned back in.

The kiss was a roaring fire to which they willingly, joyously surrendered.

They’d wanted to the night before, but it hadn’t been right. Simultaneously too exhausted and wired after the explosive shock and murmured apologies and soft explanations that had drawn on long into the early, early hours of the morning, they hadn’t been able to manage much more than to fall asleep in each other’s arms. Even though they’d been mostly pressed skin-to-skin, something had remained between them; something raw and painful that had grown in the gap of the last few years apart, keeping them apart in that last meaningful way. That something, here, now, shattered completely, and they slid back into place. Back into each other as if they’d never been apart.

John’s hand, steady now, stole from Sherlock’s side to the front of his pants, slipping in the slit and encircling the base of his semi-hard cock. 

Sherlock groaned into his mouth, brow furrowing in near anguish. He redirected his attention from John’s lips to small, peppered kisses over his face and jaw. He tasted the salty paths left by his tears and chased them down the warm column of John’s neck, sucking the sensitive skin on the side of his throat until he was sure it would leave a mark.

Alternating between a steady, firm squeezing on the base of Sherlock’s cock to delicious quick little rolls of his thumb over the glans, John worked Sherlock until the consulting detective could do little else but begin rolling his hips forward in pleasure. He was now fully hard and leaking.

“Oh, John,” Sherlock said breathlessly. Clever hands skimmed over the muscled planes of John’s pectorals, flitted briefly over hardened nipples, then moved down and around to squeeze John’s arse through the fabric of his pants. A moment later, those same hands adjusted and ducked under the elastic waistband and cupped the warm, fleshy mounds directly. First squeezing, then spreading just slightly, on the off chance his intent in words and tone hadn’t been clear enough. John arched into those hands with a gasp.

“Oh, fuck,” he groaned long and low. Sherlock hid a tight smile in the hollow of his soldier’s throat.

“Yes, that exactly,” Sherlock said agreeably. John nodded once, then again more surely. Sherlock pushed off the wall, crowding John with his taller stature until he was now the one that was being walked backwards to the bed on which they both collapsed.

Sherlock slid over John like a shadow, elbows and forearms resting on either side of his soldier’s head while a leg slid between John’s thighs. Pressing upwards insistently to give pleasurable friction to John’s own need, which caused the shorter man to hiss and buck his hips up slightly on the long, pale flesh of offered thigh.

“Christ,” John said. He tilted his head up, bumping his nose to the shelf of Sherlock’s chin and tonguing the curve of his Adam’s apple. As minimally dressed as they were—Sherlock in an undershirt and pants, John in pants only—it was the work of only seconds for them to disrobe each other completely. They pulled away to do so, then fell back into each other, skin-to-skin, mouths and hands everywhere.

It was easy to forget the suffering of the last few years as John pushed his hands through Sherlock’s unruly raven curls and thrust his hips up to slide their cocks against each other deliciously. In this moment he could have fooled himself completely, really, into forgetting how he’d come so close to putting his own trusty handgun—an extension of the soldier’s body, well-maintained even when its owner was falling apart—in his mouth in those first few days after The Fall. Come close to? Had, actually, although he hadn’t told his therapist that. Hadn’t told Sherlock that, either, among all the confessions and elucidations the night before, and wouldn’t. Ever.

John could have forgotten all of that, was willing to forget all of that, until his hands slid over the firm curve of his lovers back and felt a horror story under his palms.

“Jesus, Sherlock, what the--?” John gasped, breaking their kiss and stilling his hips.

“It’s okay. It’s…fine,” Sherlock said, pulling away to look into John’s face from a near distance. “They don’t hurt. They’re healed,” he said, simply. As if there wasn’t more to it than that. John supposed that, just like he’d never tell Sherlock how the well-oiled barrel of his gun tasted as it lay against his tongue, or how the catch of the safety flipping on and off, on and off in the still of the room had sounded so much like a gunshot, Sherlock would never tell John the story of the crisscrossing raised lines of scar tissue came to mar his perfect skin.

There was silence for a beat, the two sizing each other up— _I love you, and I’m here now, so is that enough?_ —and then someone moved their hips just a little, and there was a responding slide in turn. _Yes. It’s enough._

Sherlock ran a hand down John’s middle, through the trail of wiry blond hair that traveled from his navel to his crotch, and took hold of his erection. Pumping once, twice, then releasing to palm his hand over the hard slab of John’s left thigh, lifting it some and adjusting their positions to fit his legs between John’s.

“Let me,” Sherlock groaned. “John, I need…”

“Yes,” John said simply, biting at Sherlock’s sharp collarbone. “God, yes. Lubricant’s in the drawer.”

Sherlock peeled their sweat-slick chests from each other to reach to the bedside table, opening the drawer and pulling a small container into his hand. He poured some onto his fingers before throwing the bottle just to the side for later access, warming the slippery substance in his hand before easing it down between them. He ran his fingers over the crease of John’s arse to the shallow dip of ringed muscle, which he circled with increasing pressure until John arched up, groaning. He slid his finger in, then out, while John reached down between them to take hold of his own cock.

“Yeah. That feels…” he groaned, taking himself in hand and giving a shallow thrust. “Another.”

Sherlock put his dark head on John’s once-injured shoulder and arched his back, looking down the length of their bodies to watch as John alternated between fucking his own palm and fucking himself back on Sherlock’s fingers. It was a dizzying sight, and he bit his bottom lip in a deep groan of satisfaction. He added another finger to his ministrations of John’s body, twisting and beckoning in a ‘come-hither’ gesture until John gasped loudly.

“Ooh, Jesus,” John shook. He shut his eyes, letting his head fall back into the mattress as he tried to relax and steady his breathing, which had started up hard and fast as pleasure pooled in his belly. “Sherlock, enough. I want…oh, God, I want your prick.”

“John,” Sherlock groaned darkly, removing his fingers from John’s pliant body, which elicited a small hiss from them both. Sherlock reached up further on the bed, grabbed a pillow, and palmed John’s hip to prompt him to arch so he could slide it under him. He ducked down and captured John’s mouth with his own, and it was all tongues and teeth between the two of them.

Sherlock grabbed the bottle of lubricant, once more pouring some on his fingers. He reached down, cupping the back of John’s left knee and pushing his thigh up to lay flush against John’s strong middle and chest. John grabbed a handful of Sherlock’s dark locks as fingers once more breached him, but only briefly. John took the bottle from Sherlock and poured some into his own hand, reaching down and slicking Sherlock’s long cock from tip to base and then guiding him to his opening. The blunt head of Sherlock’s cock caught once, twice on the ring of muscle, sliding away and up the crease of John’s arse before John guided him home.

Sherlock sank into him an inch, then another, softly pulling back and thrusting forward over the course of the next couple minutes until he was fully sheathed in hot, tight flesh.

“Ohh, _John_ ,” Sherlock groaned, his voice so deep and so rough it no longer sounded quite human. Usually so articulate, it was the endearing feature the solider had come to realize of his tall, dark genius since they’d waded into a physically intimate relationship; when fucking, Sherlock was barely capable of thought or speech, usually rendered to short clips of one or two words, which were usually some variation of John’s own name.

“Uhn, I know,” John said, drinking deeply of the air in great gasps of pleasure as Sherlock started to move. “God, I missed you. I missed _this_. Fuck me, Sherlock. C’mon, then. It feels so good.”

Sherlock’s head drooped between his arched shoulder blades, his eyes mostly shut as he rut into John’s body with simple-minded focus. John swallowed tightly, pressing his nose and lips into Sherlock’s sweat-dampened curls. His hands wandered over Sherlock’s back, trying not to register the scar tissue so much as the lithe muscles flexing rhythmically, driving lean hips that fucked into him again and again so lusciously. John cupped Sherlock’s arse with one hand, squeezing and groaning appreciatively as his other hand worked back between them so he could take himself in hand once more.

“That’s it, like that. God, yes,” John grunted as Sherlock pumped with shallow thrusts that tended to glance off his prostate more often than not. Wonderful, brilliant Sherlock, whose knowledge of anatomy rivaled John's own and used it to full advantage. It wouldn’t be long until John was spilling himself between them; he could feel the liquid heat start in his groin, working his way down to his bollocks which had started to draw up tight to his body. Sherlock, though speechless and sweaty, was the picture of ease and grace. Unfair. So as not to be outdone, John pressed his lips to the delicate shell of Sherlock’s ear and whispered, “When you come, don’t pull out. I want to feel it.”

With a broken gasp, the raven-haired man started to shove himself full-bodily against his lover, rhythm breaking, simply straining towards pleasure rather than elegantly gliding towards it. As triumphant as it made the ex-soldier feel, the effect was negligible towards the goal to make Sherlock come first, because his own fervor grew in proportion. John's fist was a tight blur on his shaft and his hips rocked in return thrusts to each of Sherlock’s movements. The sound of skin on skin was magnified in the otherwise still morning, and the crudeness of it all thrilled John so that he could do no more than cry out and succumb to it.

“Oooh, Sher-oh, GOD, Sherlock!” John cried, his entire body tensing in a whirlwind of pleasure that nearly blinded him with its ferocity. His cock strained in his fist between their bodies as semen spurt across their already sweat-drenched stomachs and chests. With a broken noise, Sherlock bit into the connecting muscle of John’s neck and shoulder, giving a completely inelegant quick one-two pump before finding his own end.

“John…Oh, John…” Sherlock shook, prying his teeth from John’s skin. He rode out his orgasm with long, slow thrusts into John’s body until overwhelming sensitivity bid him to come to rest. John eased his leg down from his chest. The movement caused Sherlock’s softening cock to pull from his body, but otherwise they remained as they were. Heaving chests and sweat-slick bodies pressed tightly to one another, gentle brushing of lips on cheekbones and brows while they waited for breath to return to their bodies.

“John, I…” Sherlock said. They breathed in each other’s air from the close distance, noses bumping just slightly, gentle nudges of lips on skin. John looked to him, smiling faintly with just the corner of his mouth tipping up in prompting. “I love you,” Sherlock finally said. Apparently, his glorious brain had returned from wherever it went while they made love, and he was capable of speech again, because he continued, “And I’m…I’m so, so sorry for…for everything I’ve done. I didn’t want to leave you alone. God, I didn’t want to. If I could have taken you with me, I would have. If I could have let you know that I was alive…given you a sign...I need you to believe me, when I say that not a day went by that I didn’t think of you. John, do you forgive—”

“Yes,” John said. His tone was short and clipped, but infinitely soft. “Yes, of course. Of course, I do.”

They fell silent. Eventually Sherlock rolled off John to fall alongside him instead, and they fit together, limbs tangled, not caring about the mess. Knowing there was time to wash themselves and the sheets, time enough to get up and make the calls they had to make. For now, they had each other, and since that was all that really mattered since that first faithful case together, it was enough.


End file.
